Anything Is Possible Summary, Characters and Themes
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout is a linked-story novel set largely around the small Illinois town of Amgash, the place Lucy Barton escaped before becoming a successful writer. The book is not only about Lucy, though her presence touches many lives.
It follows people connected by memory, poverty, shame, family damage, desire, and the stubborn wish to be seen clearly. Strout writes about ordinary lives with sharp attention to private sorrow and small acts of mercy. The novel shows how people carry old wounds, misread each other, and still sometimes find moments of grace. It’s the 2nd book of the Amgash series.
Summary
Anything Is Possible opens in the world Lucy Barton left behind: a rural Illinois community marked by poverty, gossip, disappointment, and long memory. Lucy has become a novelist in New York, but her childhood in Amgash still lives in the minds of people who knew her family.
The Bartons were remembered as desperately poor, strange, and isolated. Lucy’s success makes the town look back at her with curiosity, envy, judgment, and wonder.
Tommy Guptill, once a dairy farmer, becomes one of the first figures through whom the town’s past is seen. His farm burned down years earlier after the milking machines were left running.
The loss destroyed his livelihood and changed his life. Tommy and his wife, Shirley, moved into a smaller house, and he became a school janitor.
Though the fire strained his relationship with his children, Tommy came to believe it had been a sign from God, a severe lesson that taught him to value his wife and family over property and pride.
As a janitor, Tommy often saw young Lucy Barton staying late at school, asleep or alone, avoiding the misery of home. He remembers her as a child of deep loneliness.
When he later sees Lucy’s new book displayed in a bookstore window, he is struck by how far she has traveled from Amgash. Tommy also visits Lucy’s brother Pete, who lives a narrow and lonely life.
Pete tells Tommy something shocking: Pete’s father may have caused the fire that destroyed Tommy’s farm. Tommy chooses not to accept this as truth.
His faith in the meaning of the fire weakens, but he keeps that uncertainty to himself.
Patty Nicely, a high school guidance counselor, is another person drawn into Lucy’s orbit. Patty sees Lucy being interviewed on television and remembers the Barton family’s poverty.
Patty’s own life is full of disappointment. Her husband, Sebastian, leaves her after a marriage marked by emotional closeness but sexual distance.
Sebastian had been sexually abused as a child, and his trauma shaped their relationship. Patty also carries shame from her youth, especially from the day she discovered her mother having an affair with her Spanish teacher.
That moment shattered Patty’s idea of family and left her with lifelong confusion about desire, shame, and womanhood.
At school, Patty meets Lila, Lucy Barton’s niece. Lila is rude, angry, tattooed, and defensive.
When Lila insults Patty, Patty lashes out and calls her filth. The word disturbs Patty afterward because she recognizes how cruelly shame can mark a person.
Lucy’s memoir helps Patty think about shame differently. She later apologizes to Lila and tells her that people sometimes believe they are dirty or worthless because of things done to them.
The apology reaches Lila, who cries. Patty encourages her to work hard and leave town for college.
In this act, Patty begins to repair a small part of the damage she has caused.
Other lives in the community show different forms of hidden rot. Linda Peterson-Cornell and her husband, Jay, live in a large modern home and host visiting artists during a photography festival.
Their guest, Yvonne, feels uneasy in the house. Linda and Jay watch Yvonne through security footage, and Jay’s presence becomes increasingly disturbing.
The town already remembers another crime: a teenage girl once disappeared, and a local boy later confessed to killing her and hiding her body. That old crime still hangs over the community as a reminder of the darkness that can exist inside ordinary homes.
Yvonne eventually accuses Jay of trying to rape her. Jay is arrested, then released with the help of a lawyer.
Linda’s life begins to collapse. Her daughter refuses to come home, partly because she once found videos of Jay having sex with other women.
Linda must face what she may have known, ignored, or feared about her husband. A woman named Joy, whose own son is in prison for murder, tries to visit Linda and offer support.
Linda resists, uneasy about being placed in the same category as someone whose loved one has committed a terrible act. Yet the connection is there: both women are forced to live beside the damage caused by men close to them.
Charlie Macauley, a local man haunted by the Vietnam War, reveals another kind of pain. He has been seeing Tracy, a sex worker, and has convinced himself that their relationship is love.
He is married to Marilyn, but their marriage has become distant and frayed. Charlie carries trauma from Vietnam and thinks of suffering through what he calls the hit-thumb theory: when pain first strikes, the mind may stay calm for a moment, but then the true hurt arrives.
Tracy asks Charlie for a large amount of money, supposedly for her son. Charlie suspects drugs are involved.
Still, he goes to the bank and gives her the money. Afterward, he threatens her, telling her never to contact him again.
His threat shows both fear and shame. He has betrayed his wife, lost control of his fantasy, and been forced to see the emptiness beneath it.
Alone afterward, Charlie feels the old pain of war and the more recent pain of his own choices. He wonders about people who seem unable to feel pain at all, and this fear of emotional deadness makes him confront the suffering he has tried to bury.
Angelina Mumford, another teacher, visits her mother Mary in Italy. Mary, now elderly, has left her longtime husband and married a younger Italian man named Paolo.
Angelina resents the move because it has taken Mary away from her daughters and from the expected pattern of aging and being cared for by family. Mary had waited decades before leaving her husband, and although she now lives in Italy, she still misses the man she left.
Angelina’s own marriage is in trouble. Her husband Jack left because Angelina became absorbed in talking about her mother and could not stop turning her emotional life toward Mary.
Angelina tells Mary that she and Jack may try again. Their conversations reveal how mothers and daughters can love each other fiercely while also injuring each other through need, anger, and distance.
Mary once saw something special in Angelina when she was born, but that recognition does not prevent disappointment. Angelina imagines her mother as a pioneer, not on the American prairie, but in Italy, claiming a new life late in age.
Lucy herself returns more directly when she visits Pete after a book event in Chicago. They have not seen each other in seventeen years, though Lucy calls him every Sunday.
Pete notices that she looks older, thinner, and smaller than he expected. Lucy tells him that Abel Blaine, who once stayed with the Bartons as a poor child, attended her reading.
Abel, like Lucy, has risen from poverty and now has a successful life in Chicago.
The reunion between Lucy, Pete, and their sister Vicky is awkward and painful. Vicky resents Lucy for staying away, though she also asks her for money.
The siblings remember parts of their childhood abuse, including humiliations inflicted by their mother. Lucy, who escaped through school and later through writing, is still deeply wounded.
Vicky has built a hard life working in a nursing home, where sadness is mixed with rare moments of tenderness. She also speaks proudly of her daughter Lila, who is doing better in school because of Patty’s help.
As the siblings talk, old memories become too much for Lucy. She panics and asks Vicky to drive her back to Chicago.
On the way, Vicky’s car suddenly veers off the road. Lucy gets out and decides to drive herself.
Pete and Vicky return to Amgash together, and Vicky comments that Lucy is more damaged than she appears. Pete decides that perhaps he and Vicky did not turn out so badly after all.
Lucy may have escaped, but escape did not make her whole.
Dottie Blaine, Abel’s sister, runs a bed-and-breakfast in Jennisberg. Through her guests, she studies class, marriage, loneliness, and self-deception.
One guest, Shelly Small, talks at length about her life with her doctor husband and their friendship with another couple. Shelly’s story centers on David, an old friend who divorced his wife and dated an actress named Annie Appleby.
Shelly had believed she was close to Annie, but later learned Annie thought she was foolish. The insult wounds Shelly deeply.
Dottie listens and reflects on poverty, dignity, and the ways people expose themselves without realizing it. She remembers her own childhood with Abel, when poverty made life unstable and frightening.
She also remembers Charlie Macauley staying at her bed-and-breakfast, silently crying on her sofa. Dottie feels compassion for Charlie’s visible pain.
When Shelly and her husband later mock Dottie, making cruel comments about her age and sexuality, Dottie confronts them. Her dignity unsettles them, and they leave awkwardly.
Dottie’s life has taught her to recognize both pain and cruelty, and she refuses to let their contempt pass unanswered.
Annie Appleby’s story reveals yet another hidden life. She grew up poor in a rural family where her mother favored her brother Jamie.
Annie was talkative, drawn to theater, and eager to leave. She became an actress after leaving home at sixteen and grew distant from her family.
Years later, she and her sister Cindy return home when their father Elgin, suffering from dementia, is removed from a care facility for sexually harassing male workers.
Annie learns that Elgin had long carried on a secret relationship with a man named Seth Potter. This discovery changes how she understands her childhood.
Her father had often worried about her wandering in the woods, and Annie now realizes the woods may have been where he met Seth. The revelation teaches her that even those closest to us may contain desires and secrets we never imagined.
Her father was not only the stern, sometimes loving man she knew; he was also someone with a concealed passion and a hidden self.
The novel closes with Abel Blaine, who has become wealthy after years of hard work. At Christmas, he attends a performance of A Christmas Carol with his family.
He thinks of Dottie and worries about her loneliness. He also remembers seeing Lucy Barton at her reading.
During the play, the lights go out and the theater grows tense as families argue and struggle to leave. Abel’s family stays seated until order returns.
Later, Abel goes backstage to retrieve his granddaughter’s stuffed pony and meets Link McKenzie, the actor playing Scrooge. Link admits he caused the blackout and mocks Abel for his wealth and family concerns.
Abel does not collapse under the insult. He knows what it means to be hungry, to care for Dottie, and to work hard enough to survive.
Link, despite his bitterness, recognizes Abel as real. As Abel begins to suffer a medical emergency, he has a sudden moment of clarity.
He understands that life can change in any direction, for anyone. The title’s meaning becomes clear: damage, recovery, cruelty, tenderness, escape, failure, and grace are all possible.
Characters
Lucy Barton
Lucy Barton is the absent center of Anything Is Possible, a character whose life affects nearly everyone even when she is not physically present. She grew up in severe poverty in Amgash, marked by neglect, humiliation, and domestic violence, yet she manages to leave that world and become a successful writer in New York.
Her success makes her seem almost legendary to people in her hometown, but the book does not present her escape as simple triumph. Lucy remains fragile, anxious, and deeply wounded by her childhood.
Her return to see Pete and Vicky shows how difficult it is for her to face the family and town she left behind. She calls Pete every Sunday, which suggests loyalty and guilt, but she avoids visiting for years, showing that emotional survival sometimes requires distance.
Lucy’s panic in Vicky’s car reveals that the past is not behind her; it is still inside her body. She represents the possibility of escape, but also the cost of escape.
She has transformed pain into art, yet writing does not erase the original damage.
Tommy Guptill
Tommy Guptill is one of the gentlest and most morally searching figures in the book. After losing his dairy farm in a fire, he rebuilds his life as a school janitor and comes to believe that the disaster was a sign from God.
This belief allows him to turn loss into meaning. Instead of becoming bitter, he sees the fire as a lesson that taught him to value his wife, children, and faith.
His compassion is shown in his memories of Lucy Barton, whom he saw sleeping at school after hours when she was young. Tommy understands that the Barton children suffered, and he compares their poverty to his own downfall with humility rather than superiority.
His encounter with Pete shakes the foundation of his faith when Pete claims that his father caused the fire. Tommy’s refusal to fully believe this is not merely denial; it is his attempt to protect the meaning that helped him survive.
He is a man who wants goodness to be real, even when evidence makes that difficult.
Pete Barton
Pete Barton is Lucy’s brother, a lonely man still living close to the site of the family’s suffering. Unlike Lucy, Pete never truly escapes Amgash.
His life feels small, restricted, and shaped by old wounds. Yet he is not portrayed as hopeless.
His weekly volunteering with Tommy Guptill at the soup kitchen shows that he has found a modest form of purpose. Pete carries memories of his family’s violence and poverty, but he also carries resentment toward Lucy, whose success and absence make her both admired and judged.
His reunion with Lucy and Vicky reveals his complicated place between them. He watches Lucy’s fragility with surprise and comes to believe that he and Vicky may not have turned out as badly as he once thought.
This does not mean he is fully healed. Rather, Pete’s realization shows how people measure survival in strange ways.
He has been damaged, but he has endured. His character gives quiet dignity to those who stay behind.
Vicky Barton
Vicky Barton is sharp, resentful, practical, and wounded. She is Lucy’s sister and Lila’s mother, and her life shows another outcome of the Barton childhood.
Vicky did not become famous or wealthy; she works in a nursing home, surrounded by aging, illness, and death. Yet the book does not treat her life as a failure.
Her work is depressing, but she also notices moments of sweetness, such as a silent patient suddenly speaking. These moments show that Vicky has not lost the ability to recognize tenderness.
Her anger toward Lucy comes from abandonment, class resentment, and the old pain of being left with memories Lucy escaped physically but not emotionally. Vicky’s recollections of childhood abuse reveal how brutal the Barton household was, especially under their mother’s cruelty.
As a mother, Vicky is imperfect but hopeful. Her pride in Lila’s academic improvement suggests that she wants a better future for her daughter.
Vicky is tough because she has had to be, but beneath that toughness is hurt, loyalty, and a rough form of love.
Patty Nicely
Patty Nicely is one of the most important figures in Anything Is Possible because her character shows how shame can damage a life and how self-awareness can begin to repair it. She works as a guidance counselor, a role that suggests wisdom and care, yet she is also deeply insecure.
Her marriage to Sebastian has collapsed, and her memories of discovering her mother’s affair continue to shape her understanding of sex, love, and self-worth. Patty’s cruelty toward Lila, when she calls the girl filth, comes from her own buried shame.
She recognizes afterward that the word has a terrible force because it names the way damaged people often see themselves. Her apology to Lila is one of the book’s clearest acts of moral repair.
Patty does not become perfect, but she becomes honest. Her attraction to Charlie also reveals her longing for connection, even when that connection may be complicated.
Patty’s strength lies in her ability to admit harm and try to do better.
Sebastian
Sebastian, Patty’s husband, is a quiet but significant character whose trauma shapes Patty’s married life. He and Patty meet in a hotel and build a relationship through written correspondence, suggesting that emotional intimacy comes more easily to them than physical closeness.
Sebastian’s history of childhood sexual abuse leaves him unable to have a conventional sexual relationship with Patty, and this creates a marriage built on sympathy, communication, and distance. His departure from Patty is painful, but the book does not reduce him to cruelty or weakness.
He is a man formed by something done to him long before Patty knew him. Through Sebastian, the story shows how abuse travels into adulthood and affects not only the survivor but also those who love the survivor.
His character also helps Patty understand Lila. When Patty tells Lila that Sebastian believed he was filth because of what happened to him, she transforms private marital pain into compassion for someone younger and more vulnerable.
Lila
Lila is Lucy Barton’s niece and Vicky’s daughter, a teenager who initially appears rude, crude, and defiant. Her tattoos, language, and hostility make her seem like a familiar troubled student, but the book gradually shows that her behavior is a defense against shame and expectation.
As a Barton, she inherits the town’s judgment. People assume things about her because of her family’s history, and Patty at first participates in that cruelty.
Lila’s confrontation with Patty exposes how quickly adults can dismiss young people who already feel rejected. Yet Lila is not fixed in that role.
After Patty apologizes and encourages her, Lila begins to do well in school and may have a chance to attend college. Her character represents the possibility that inherited damage can be interrupted.
She is not saved by one conversation, but one adult’s honesty gives her room to imagine a future beyond Amgash. Lila’s story is a small but meaningful sign that care can matter.
Linda Peterson-Cornell
Linda Peterson-Cornell is a disturbing and tragic figure because she lives beside corruption while trying not to fully see it. Her spacious modern home suggests success, taste, and control, but the private reality inside it is cold and unsafe.
She and her husband Jay watch their guest Yvonne through security footage, a detail that immediately reveals the household’s moral sickness. Linda sleeps apart from Jay and carries an old bodily dread connected to him, suggesting that she has long sensed something wrong.
When Yvonne accuses Jay of attempted rape, Linda’s world begins to break open. Her daughter’s refusal to return home adds another layer of judgment, especially because the daughter had earlier discovered sexual videos involving Jay.
Linda’s tragedy lies partly in her uncertainty: how much did she know, and how much did she refuse to know? She is not presented as simply innocent or guilty.
She is a woman trapped in the consequences of denial, fear, and social preservation.
Jay Peterson-Cornell
Jay Peterson-Cornell is one of the book’s most unsettling men. He occupies a position of wealth and authority, yet his behavior suggests predation, voyeurism, and entitlement.
His watching of Yvonne through security footage is a violation disguised as domestic control. His interactions with her carry a threat that others sense even before the accusation becomes explicit.
Jay’s creepiness is not loud; it works through atmosphere, power, and the discomfort he creates. The later accusation that he tried to rape Yvonne confirms the danger that has surrounded him.
His daughter’s earlier discovery of videos of him with other women adds to the picture of a man whose private life is filled with exploitation and secrecy. Jay represents a form of male power protected by money, lawyers, and the hesitation of those around him to name what they see.
His character also exposes the emotional damage caused by men whose public respectability hides private harm.
Yvonne Tuttle
Yvonne Tuttle enters the book as a visiting photographer, but her role becomes crucial because she exposes the threat inside Linda and Jay’s home. At first, she seems uneasy, judgmental, and perhaps overly sensitive, calling the house creepy and relying on a pill to relax.
Yet her discomfort proves meaningful. She senses what is wrong before it becomes visible to others.
Her accusation against Jay transforms her from guest to witness and victim. Yvonne’s vulnerability is heightened by the fact that she is staying in someone else’s space, dependent on hosts who are secretly watching her.
Her character shows how danger can be hidden beneath hospitality and social polish. She also reveals how easily a victim’s credibility can become entangled in power structures, since Jay is quickly helped by a lawyer.
Yvonne may not dominate the book, but her presence forces hidden corruption into the open.
Karen-Lucie
Karen-Lucie is a famous photographer and Yvonne’s friend, and she functions as both observer and commentator. She listens, speaks frankly, and recognizes Jay’s creepiness.
Her conversations with Yvonne about Joy and the son who murdered a girl widen the book’s focus from one household to a broader pattern of hidden violence. Karen-Lucie’s fame also places her in contrast with the provincial setting around her.
She moves through the art festival with confidence and social awareness, but she is not immune to the unease created by Jay. Her character helps sharpen the reader’s sense that what is happening in Linda’s house is not merely awkwardness but danger.
She also shows how outsiders can sometimes see a community’s sickness more clearly than those who live inside it.
Joy
Joy is a mother whose son murdered a teenage girl and hid the body. Her life has been permanently altered by someone else’s crime, yet that someone is her child.
This gives her one of the book’s heaviest moral burdens. She attempts to visit Linda after Jay’s arrest because she understands what it means to be connected to a person accused of terrible harm.
Her effort to help is awkward, even unwanted, but it comes from experience. Joy’s character shows the social loneliness of people related to criminals.
She is not responsible for her son’s act, yet she must live under its shadow. Her divorce after the crime suggests that such trauma can destroy families around the guilty person.
Joy stands as a figure of unwanted knowledge. She knows what Linda is only beginning to understand: that life after public disgrace is isolating, humiliating, and impossible to fully explain to those outside it.
Charlie Macauley
Charlie Macauley is a deeply damaged man whose past in Vietnam continues to control his present. He appears in relation to Patty, Angelina, Dottie, Marilyn, and Tracy, and each connection reveals a different part of him.
He is lonely inside his marriage, drawn to the illusion of rescue through Tracy, and unable to escape the pain of war. His hit-thumb theory captures his emotional pattern: trauma may seem distant or manageable at first, but then the pain arrives with force.
Charlie’s relationship with Tracy is built on fantasy, need, sex, and self-deception. He wants to believe they are in love, but the request for money exposes the transactional reality he has tried to ignore.
His threat after giving her the money shows his shame and fear turning into cruelty. Yet Charlie is not portrayed as only contemptible.
His silent crying at Dottie’s bed-and-breakfast shows a man overwhelmed by pain. He is morally flawed, but he is also wounded, frightened, and lost.
Marilyn Macauley
Marilyn Macauley, Charlie’s wife, appears mainly through Charlie’s strained connection to her. She represents the ordinary domestic life from which Charlie has emotionally withdrawn.
Her phone calls, complaints, and family concerns contrast with Charlie’s secret life with Tracy and his unresolved war trauma. Marilyn may seem mundane from Charlie’s perspective, but that perspective is limited and self-serving.
She is also a person being betrayed, since Charlie uses money from their marriage to pay Tracy. Her character shows how trauma and selfishness can harm spouses who are not responsible for the original wound.
Marilyn’s concerns about family, including her daughter-in-law, may appear small compared to Charlie’s suffering, but the book does not suggest that her life is meaningless. Instead, she represents the daily world Charlie cannot fully inhabit.
His inability to be present with her is part of his tragedy and part of his failure.
Tracy
Tracy is a sex worker who becomes the focus of Charlie’s fantasy of love and escape. She begins as someone he pays, but over time Charlie convinces himself that their relationship has become something more.
Tracy’s request for $10,000 breaks that illusion. She may genuinely have needs involving her son, or she may be manipulating Charlie; the book leaves room for discomfort rather than easy judgment.
Tracy is important because she reveals Charlie’s desire to be seen, wanted, and freed from his marriage and memories. At the same time, her role exposes the power imbalance and emotional confusion within transactional intimacy.
Charlie wants tenderness from a situation shaped by money, secrecy, and desperation. Tracy’s character is not developed as fully as Charlie’s, but she is not merely a symbol.
She is a woman with her own pressures and survival strategies, and her demand forces Charlie to confront the false story he has told himself.
Mary Mumford
Mary Mumford, also known as Mississippi Mary, is Angelina’s mother and one of the book’s most vivid older women. She has lived most of her life in marriage and motherhood, raising five daughters before finally leaving her husband and moving to Italy to marry Paolo, a much younger man.
Her decision is bold but not simple. She gains freedom, yet she misses her former husband.
She becomes a figure of late-life reinvention, but her independence wounds Angelina, who feels abandoned and deprived of the chance to care for her mother in old age. Mary’s relationship with Angelina is intense because she once recognized something special in her at birth.
That special bond does not prevent anger or misunderstanding. Mary is selfish, brave, loving, vain, and regretful all at once.
Her character resists the idea that age brings clarity. Even at seventy-eight, she is still choosing, desiring, hurting others, and being hurt.
Angelina Mumford
Angelina Mumford is a woman whose emotional life has become consumed by her mother. She is a teacher, a wife, and a mother of twins, yet her identity is strongly tied to Mary’s choices.
Her visit to Italy is filled with resentment, longing, and unfinished grief. Angelina is angry that Mary has moved away because it disrupts the daughterly role she imagined for herself.
She wanted to care for her mother, be near her, and perhaps claim a central place in Mary’s final years. Instead, Mary has chosen a new husband and a new country.
Angelina’s marriage to Jack suffers because she cannot stop talking about Mary. Jack’s departure suggests that Angelina has allowed her mother to occupy the space where her marriage should be.
Still, Angelina is not foolish. She is trying to understand love, duty, and abandonment.
Her image of Mary as a pioneer shows both admiration and pain. She resents her mother’s freedom because she also envies it.
Jack
Jack is Angelina’s husband, and though he remains mostly outside the direct action, his absence has strong meaning. He leaves Angelina because her fixation on her mother has overwhelmed their marriage.
Jack’s departure shows that emotional obsession can be as damaging as betrayal. He is not described as cruel; rather, he appears to be a man who has reached the limit of being secondary in his own marriage.
His willingness to try again when Angelina returns suggests that the relationship is not entirely broken. Jack’s role is to reveal the cost of Angelina’s unresolved attachment to Mary.
He also shows how family history can invade a marriage, turning one partner into an audience for a drama that began long before the relationship itself.
Dottie Blaine
Dottie Blaine is one of the most perceptive characters in Anything Is Possible. As the owner of a bed-and-breakfast, she observes people closely, especially the ways class, shame, and loneliness reveal themselves in conversation.
Her childhood poverty with Abel taught her fear, resilience, and sensitivity to social judgment. Unlike some characters who respond to humiliation by hiding, Dottie has developed a quiet strength.
Her encounter with Shelly and Dr. Small shows her moral clarity. She listens to Shelly’s self-absorbed stories with patience, but when the Smalls mock her age and sexuality, she confronts them directly.
Dottie’s dignity is rooted in experience. She knows what it is to be looked down on, and she refuses to accept cruelty disguised as sophistication.
Her compassion for Charlie, whom she remembers crying silently, shows her ability to distinguish real suffering from shallow complaint. Dottie is practical, proud, wounded, and deeply humane.
Abel Blaine
Abel Blaine is a powerful example of survival transformed into success. Like Lucy, he comes from poverty, but his path leads to business achievement, wealth, and family stability.
As a child, he helped care for Dottie and learned the discipline of work through hunger and need. His adult life gives him material comfort, but he remains connected to his past.
He worries about Dottie, remembers hardship, and recognizes Lucy as someone who also escaped deprivation. Abel’s encounter with Link McKenzie tests his sense of self.
Link mocks his wealth and family concerns, but Abel is not easily shaken because he knows the truth of his own life. He has earned what he has, not merely in money but in endurance.
During his medical crisis, Abel reaches the book’s central realization: anyone’s life can change beyond expectation. His character closes the story with a sense of hard-won wonder rather than easy optimism.
Shelly Small
Shelly Small is a talkative, socially privileged woman whose visit to Dottie’s bed-and-breakfast reveals insecurity beneath comfort. She tells Dottie about her marriage, friendships, and humiliation by Annie Appleby, especially the painful discovery that Annie thought she was an idiot.
Shelly’s need to talk suggests loneliness and a hunger to be taken seriously. Yet she is also capable of cruelty, as shown when she and Dr. Small mock Dottie.
This contradiction makes her believable. Shelly has been hurt by condescension, but she repeats condescension toward someone she considers beneath her.
Her character exposes how class arrogance often coexists with private humiliation. She wants sympathy for being dismissed, but she fails to see the personhood of the woman listening to her.
Shelly’s weakness is not that she talks too much; it is that she does not listen deeply enough.
Dr. Small
Dr. Small is a man who clings to professional status. His insistence on being recognized as a physician rather than an academic reveals vanity and social insecurity.
He seems polished, but his behavior at the bed-and-breakfast exposes pettiness. Along with Shelly, he mocks Dottie, assuming that she is too old, too ordinary, or too beneath him to command respect.
His mockery shows how education and professional success do not guarantee kindness. Dr. Small’s past as a physician in Vietnam also contrasts with Charlie’s traumatic war experience.
While Charlie is devastated by war, Dr. Small appears to have passed through it peacefully, which shows how the same historical event can mark people differently. His character is less emotionally open than many others in the book, but he serves an important role in showing the ugliness of casual class contempt.
Annie Appleby
Annie Appleby is an actress who left a poor rural childhood to build an independent life. Her early talkativeness and attraction to theater suggest a child trying to find expression beyond the limits of family and town.
Leaving home at sixteen gives her freedom, but it also distances her from her parents and siblings. Annie is seen from multiple angles: Shelly remembers her as a glamorous friend who later proved cruel, while Annie’s own story reveals her complicated family background.
Her discovery of her father’s secret relationship with Seth Potter changes her understanding of him and of childhood itself. Annie learns that the people closest to us can contain hidden desires that remain invisible for decades.
She is not only a successful actress or a cruel acquaintance; she is also a daughter forced to revise the story of her family. Her character shows how adulthood often means discovering that one’s parents were strangers in ways one never imagined.
Elgin Appleby
Elgin Appleby, Annie’s father, is a stern rural man whose hidden life reshapes his daughter’s understanding of the past. As a father, he could be cold, strict, and rough, but he was also protective in his own way.
His concern over Annie wandering into the woods seemed, at the time, like ordinary parental worry. Later, when Annie learns of his secret affair with Seth Potter, that worry takes on new meaning.
The woods were likely not only a dangerous place for a child but also the site of Elgin’s private desire. His dementia and removal from a care facility for sexually harassing male employees bring his hidden sexuality into public view in a painful and humiliating way.
Elgin’s character is tragic because his true self appears only through fragments, secrecy, and decline. He shows how repression can shape an entire life and leave children with questions that can never be fully answered.
Sylvia Appleby
Sylvia Appleby, Annie’s mother, is defined largely by her favoritism toward her son Jamie. Her preference creates emotional imbalance within the family and shapes Annie’s sense of being less valued.
Sylvia represents a type of motherhood that is not openly monstrous but still damaging. By loving one child more visibly than the others, she creates rivalry, longing, and quiet injury.
Her role also reflects the gender patterns of rural family life, where the son who stays and helps on the farm may be prized over daughters who leave or seek other lives. Sylvia is not explored as deeply as some characters, but her presence helps explain Annie’s hunger for attention and performance.
Annie’s career as an actress can be read partly as a movement away from a home where she was not the chosen child.
Jamie Appleby
Jamie Appleby is Annie’s brother, the favored child who remains close to home. He stays single, lives with his parents, and helps his father on the farm.
His life contrasts strongly with Annie’s escape into acting. Jamie represents continuity, duty, and perhaps limitation.
Because Sylvia favors him, he occupies a privileged place in the family, though that privilege may also trap him. He stays where Annie leaves.
His role in the book is quiet, but he helps define the family structure Annie reacts against. Through Jamie, the story shows that staying and leaving both carry costs.
He may be loved more openly, but he also seems bound to the parents and land in ways Annie avoids.
Cindy Appleby
Cindy Appleby, Annie’s sister, represents a more conventional route out of the family. She marries and moves to another town, neither remaining like Jamie nor breaking away as dramatically as Annie.
Her return with Annie when Elgin is removed from the care facility shows that family duty still pulls the siblings back, even after years of distance. Cindy’s character provides balance within the Appleby family.
She suggests that escape does not always look like fame or reinvention; sometimes it is quieter, shaped by marriage, relocation, and ordinary life. Her presence also reminds us that family revelations are shared unevenly.
Each child must absorb the truth about Elgin from a different emotional position.
Link McKenzie
Link McKenzie, the actor playing Scrooge, is bitter, theatrical, and confrontational. His decision to cause the blackout during the Christmas performance reveals resentment and a desire to disrupt the comfort of the audience.
When he meets Abel backstage, he mocks Abel’s wealth and family attachment, treating them as signs of shallowness. Yet Link’s judgment weakens when he recognizes Abel’s authenticity.
Abel is not simply a rich man; he is someone formed by hunger, responsibility, and work. Link’s role is brief but significant because he challenges the final movement of the book.
He introduces hostility into a scene of family tradition and holiday performance, but he also becomes capable of recognition. His grudging respect for Abel suggests that even cynical people can perceive truth when they encounter it.
Themes
Shame and the Need to Be Seen Clearly
Shame shapes many lives in Anything Is Possible, often beginning in childhood and continuing into adulthood as silence, anger, avoidance, or self-punishment. Lucy Barton carries the shame of poverty and family abuse even after becoming a successful writer.
Patty Nicely carries sexual shame after discovering her mother’s affair, and that buried wound affects her marriage, body image, and conduct as a counselor. Sebastian believes himself to be damaged because of childhood sexual abuse, and his pain becomes part of Patty’s own emotional life.
Lila inherits shame through family reputation before she has had the chance to define herself. The book is especially interested in the difference between being seen and being judged.
Many characters are watched, discussed, or mocked, but few are truly understood. Dottie sees Charlie’s pain more clearly than people who might only condemn him.
Patty’s apology to Lila matters because she stops seeing the girl as a problem and begins seeing her as a wounded person with a future. Shame isolates people, but recognition can interrupt that isolation.
The story does not claim that shame disappears easily. It suggests that being seen with mercy can change the direction of a life, even if only slightly.
Poverty, Class, and the Memory of Humiliation
Poverty in the novel is not only a lack of money; it is a force that marks the body, memory, and social identity. Lucy, Pete, Vicky, Abel, and Dottie all come from conditions that leave lasting traces.
Lucy’s success does not erase the image of her as a poor Barton child sleeping at school. Abel’s wealth does not erase his memory of working hard to feed Dottie.
Dottie’s bed-and-breakfast gives her independence, yet she remains alert to class contempt, especially when guests like the Smalls underestimate her. Poverty creates fear, instability, and shame, but it also produces forms of knowledge that more comfortable characters lack.
Those who have been poor understand hunger, exposure, and the danger of being dismissed by others. Class also shapes how people speak about one another.
The Barton family is treated as a town story, almost as if their suffering belongs to public gossip. Lila is judged through that inherited reputation.
The novel shows that class humiliation can remain alive long after circumstances change. A person may leave poverty behind materially and still carry its emotional record.
Strout’s characters reveal that social mobility is never only economic; it is also psychological, familial, and moral.
Family Damage and Inherited Pain
Families in the story are places of love, injury, obligation, and confusion. The Barton children grow up under abuse and deprivation, and each sibling responds differently.
Lucy leaves and becomes a writer, Pete stays and narrows his life, and Vicky survives through toughness and work. Their reunion shows that siblings can share a childhood and still remember it differently, or need different distances from it.
Patty’s adult life is shaped by the collapse of her family after her mother’s affair. Angelina’s marriage suffers because her emotional attention remains fixed on her mother.
Mary’s late-life escape gives her freedom but leaves her daughter feeling abandoned. Annie’s understanding of her father changes when she learns about his secret relationship with Seth Potter, proving that children often know only fragments of their parents’ lives.
The book treats family not as a stable source of comfort but as a complicated inheritance. What parents hide, deny, or fail to heal often passes into the next generation.
Yet the story also allows for partial repair. Patty helps Lila.
Pete and Vicky share a moment of recognition. Abel continues to worry about Dottie.
Family damage may endure, but care can still appear inside it.
The Possibility of Change and Moral Choice
The title’s promise is not naive optimism. The novel shows that anything being possible includes harm, betrayal, violence, illness, and disgrace, but it also includes tenderness, apology, survival, and unexpected renewal.
Tommy tries to understand disaster as a sign from God, then must face the possibility that the event he built his faith around may have had a darker cause. Patty chooses to apologize to Lila instead of protecting her pride.
Abel rises from poverty into wealth but remains connected to the lessons of hardship. Mary leaves a long marriage late in life and begins again in Italy, even though the new beginning is mixed with regret.
Charlie’s choices are more morally troubled; he seeks comfort through Tracy, betrays Marilyn, and then reacts with threat and shame. The book does not divide people neatly into good and bad.
It asks how people behave after pain, and whether they can recognize the harm they cause. Change is possible, but it is rarely clean.
Some characters grow through mercy, some through humiliation, some through crisis, and some only briefly glimpse the truth before it is too late. The novel’s moral world is built on the idea that every person remains unfinished.
